Contributors

This release (in C++) includes the source code of several
algorithms for approximate string matching. They include algorithms
of our recently published papers, an algorithm of our ongoing work,
and an algorithm invented by Microsoft Researchers
in a paper published in VLDB 2006.

The motivation of this research is to efficiently answer the
following two types of approximate string queries:

Search: Given a collection of strings and a single string,
how to find those strings in the collection that are "similar to" the
given string?

Join: Given two collections of strings (possibly the same
collection), how to find those pairs of strings that are "similar to"
each other?

There are various string similarity functions, such as
edit
distance, jaccard, and cosine. The following is the list of
algorithms corresponding to the source directory structure:

MAT-Tree: MAT-tree is an indexing structure to support
queries on data with an approximate string predicate and a numeric
predicate. A typical query is: "Find employee records whose name is
similar to Speilberg and whose age is close to 45." The indexing
structure is proposed in the following paper: "Indexing Mixed Types
for Approximate Retrieval," Liang Jin, Nick Koudas, Chen Li, Anthony
K.H. Tung, VLDB 2005, Trondheim, Norway.

SEPIA: This technique solves the problem of estimating the
selectivity of an approximate string predicate. It can answer
questions such as: "From a collection of strings, how many of them
have an edit distance within 3 to a given string?". Such information
can be used in optimizing queries of approximate string matching. The
technique was published the paper: "Selectivity Estimation for Fuzzy
String Predicates in Large Data Sets," Liang Jin and Chen Li, VLDB
2005, Trondheim, Norway.

StringMap: This algorithm maps strings from the
edit-distance metric place to a high-dimensional Euclidean space, and
uses a multi-dimensional indexing structure to answer approximate
queries. The algorithm is published in the paper: "Efficient Record
Linkage in Large Data Sets," by Liang Jin, Chen Li, and Sharad
Mehrotra, in 8th International Conference on Database Systems for
Advanced Applications (DASFAA) 2003, Kyoto, Japan.

FilterTree: This is a new algorithm we are
developing to support approximate string queries using a tree
structure.

PartEnum: This algorithm is published in the paper:
"Efficient Exact Set-Similarity Joins," Arvind Arasu, Venkatesh Ganti,
Raghav Kaushik, VLDB 2006. We implemented the algorithm to
support approximate selection queries.

In addition, we have provided some commonly used functions in the
"util" directory.

Acknowledgements: This release is partially
supported by the
NSF CAREER
Award, No. IIS-0238586, the
NSF-funded RESCUE project, a
Google Research Award, and a fund
from CalIt2.

License Agreement: Permission to use, copy,
modify, and distribute the implementations of MAT-Tree, SEPIA,
StringMap, and FilterTree is permitted under the terms of the GNU
Public License (GPL). The implementation of the PartEnum algorithm
invented by Microsoft researchers is limited to non commercial use,
which would be covered under the royalty free covenant that Microsoft
made public.

For any questions regarding this release, please send email to
flamingo AT ics.uci.edu